When eight-year-old Ania is sent to stay with her grandmother for the summer holidays, she finds a house full of strangers and a grandmother who pretends not to know her. Ania only returns home six years later.

This autobiography is about childhood in an illegal cult in the USSR, involving the scientific and creative elite of the Soviet Union. The cult's leader, V. D. Stolbun, claimed to be raising a breed of superhuman immune to any physical or mental illness.

Any totalitarian cult is built on a strict hierarchy and is controlled entirely by its leader, whose only motive is power.

This is a book about adults betraying the children in their care. It warns us to be wary of anyone who claims to be "saving the world", and contains tools to identify a cult before it is too late.

The author managed to free herself from the puppetmaster's grip, but his appalling activities continue to this day.